Microsoft and RSS: who cares?

Duncan Riley> No, I’m not being provocative for the sake of it, I really don’t care. In case you haven’t heardthe news Microsoft will be supporting RSS in the next version of Windows. Now don’t get me wrong, there is a really wonderful cultural shifts underway at Microsoft that deserves a post on its own, but individually Longhorn and IE supporting RSS doesn’t really make any difference to me, and nor should it to most bloggers, because at the end of the day, as much as RSS feeds are handy to read, and provide a way for others to easily monitor our blogs, it makes no difference to the leading equation of the blogosphere: and that’s content.

All the RSS in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you’ve not got appealing content, content that appeals to a niche in the long tail. RSS is only a convenient means to an end for all bloggers from the rank amateur through to the network guru: at the end of the day its just another way of providing information, and I’ll add from recent reports that for those providing a full feed not a very profitable one at that.

If you are looking for quality out of Gnomedex, look to god, because of what I’ve read so far, Dave Winer perhaps delivered one of the more interesting speeches: to quote god:
“Blogging is about individual choice.”
And he’s right. Sure, Atom may be doomed thanks to Microsoft’s announcement but its appealing to the individual’s choice that will bring you visitors, not the type of your RSS feed. The only people who should be interested in this announcement is those companies providing Outlook feed readers and similar: sorry folks, your screwed.